CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Notes 407
a place for laundering. This is, in part, because such groups often have
millions in currency notes on hand for six months to a year or even
longer. With the strengthening of the euro against the dollar since 2002,
many criminals would rather hold euros than dollars until the laundering
process can get the cash into bank accounts or investments. In other
words, Europe is just as accommodating to dirty money as the United
States. Some people with stacks of illegal bills apparently are making a
currency arbitrage decision aimed at holding the value of their cash, a
decision not influenced by differences between the two financial centers’
money-laundering enforcement procedures.
35. A senior U.S. Treasury Department official, Daniel L. Glaser, Director,
Executive Office for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crime, said on
December 10, 2003, “If the purpose of an anti–money laundering
regime is to stop dirty money at the door, we can’t succeed.” This certainly
must be one of the purposes of the regime, together with discouraging
it from getting to the bank in the first place. If dirty money
is stopped at the bank once, it probably won’t be brought back to the
same place a second time. I am not criticizing Glaser. On the contrary,
he is one of the most effective officers dealing with money laundering
and terrorist financing issues.
36. Ronen Palan, “Tax Havens and the Commercialization of State Sovereignty,”
International Organizations 56, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 161–162.
37. Ibid., 161.
38. Ibid., 152.
39. Marc Lopatin, “Tax Avoiders Rob Wealth of Nations.” The Observer,
November 17, 2002, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/
0,6903,841410,00.html. Also, interview by the author with a former
Jersey government official, London, England, not for attribution.
40. Mark P. Hampton and John Christensen, “Offshore Pariahs? Small Island
Economies, Tax Havens, and the Re-configuration of Global Finance,”
World Development 30, no. 9 (2002): 1667.
41. Palan, “Tax Havens and the Commercialization of State Sovereignty,”
158.
42. A thorough review of the offshore phenomenon is contained in Jack A.
Blum, “Offshore Money” in Transnational Crime in the Americas: An
Inter-American Dialogue Book, ed. Tom Farer (New York: Routledge,
1999), 57–84.